Tim Keck, publisher of The Stranger in Seattle, has a cash infusion from the Chicago Reader to turn up the heat on his competition. The Reader is now a minority shareholder in Index Newspapers LLC, a company formed early yesterday that now owns and operates The Stranger and The Portland Mercury in Portland, Ore. Keck’s first goal: increase circulation in both markets. “We’ve been bootstrapping it for 10 years,” Keck tells AAN News. “Now we are going to be aggressively growing the business.”
The bare-knuckled battle between Seattle Weekly and The Stranger in the land of Starbucks is laid bare by Seattle Post-Intelligencer writer John Marshall. He looks into whether two alt-weeklies can survive in a city the size of Seattle and whether the Stranger's "performance-art" journalistic style can knock out the more upscale, serious Weekly.
Since its mid-June release, “The Stranger Guide to Seattle: The City’s Smartest, Pickiest, Most Obsessive Urban Manual” has been flying off bookstore shelves and out of dot.com mail-order warehouses -- and not just in Seattle.
A photo of the marquee of a local nudie bar ("Breast of Seattle") graces the covers this week of both Seattle Weekly and The Stranger. For the Weekly, the photo illustrates the paper's annual "Best of Seattle" reader survey; for The Stranger, it fronts for "the Best of Kevin Jones' Apartment." Weekly publisher Alisa Cromer tells the Seattle Times, "It's like having an annoying younger brother repeating everything you say."
Seattle Style: A Contradiction in Terms?
